Research
Mathias’s main research topic is the social construction of friends and ennemies in international relations. He has mainly worked on two cases: the reconciliation between France and Germany and the “Global war on terror”. Parallel to this main research agenda, Mathias has also done some research on the epistemology of the social sciences, in particular the false promises of positivism and the epistemology of the critical war studies.
Theoretically, Mathias draws upon a reflexive approach inspired by the work of poststructuralist and postcolonial authors like Michel Foucault, Judith Butler and Ranajit Guha.
Empirically, he uses a variety of methods including archival work, qualitative interviews, ethnography and, to a lesser extent, statistical analysis.
Research Interests
The reconciliation between France and Germany
On September 4th, 2013, French President François Hollande and German President Joachim Gauck visited Oradour-sur-Glane, a French martyr village of the Second World War whose population was massacred by an SS division during the Liberation. During the ceremony, the...
The Global war on terror
The Global War on Terror has killed or harmed far more innocent people than "terrorism" over the last twenty years. This observation has led some critical scholars to reverse the mainstream question on political violence. Instead of asking how and why some people...
The epistemology of the social sciences
Like most critical social scientists, Mathias is interested in how to produce scientific knowledge on the social world which would avoid the false promises of positivism. This has led him to investigate two questions: a) The false promises of positivism John Dryzek...